What was limitless shot on

The opening titles play as the camera travels down the side of a building and into the windshield of a taxi cab on the street.

The camera then switches to the perspective of that cab, flying past — and through — other vehicles, along New York streets, within MRI brain scans, up into the sky and back down into New York before settling on Eddie as he strolls along the road.

These street-level zooms for the opening titles were realised by Comen VFX, with the camera passing through block after block, designed also as representative of fractal patterns Burger hoped to re-create. Apart from the falling camera shot down the side of the building, no real CGI was used in the entire sequence. The zooms were realised by combining 4K plates shot on the three-camera RED rig.

With that technique we ended up going down miles and miles of city streets. Initial animatics were created in Final Cut Pro with rough seams to help with the overall design. At the same time, artists at Comen developed a short part of the title sequence in Nuke as a proof of concept, testing things like motion blur and presenting the work to the director and the studio for sign-off.

The overall visual aesthetic on the film is that when Eddie is on the drug, things come into clearer focus and have more vibrant colours and have a more pristine feel to them, and he wanted to extend that for the title sequence as well.

The final 1. From there we had a camera that would reliably stay at the same speed and we built a slider into it so that we could ramp the speed down very slightly at the beginning — because we start with that very fast plummet down to the city streets — and then ramped it down to a steady speed by the time we were frames in. For all the people who are confused about the movie, here is Limitless ending explained. At the ending of Limitless , Gennady injects himself with NZT and explains to Eddie that he has found a way of making the effects last longer by injecting it directly to the bloodstream.

He also says that the effects of NZT last longer and the withdrawal symptoms are also lessened. Eddie kills Gennady when he threatens to eviscerate Eddie. He then recovers his mental abilities and kills the remaining henchmen. After a year, Eddie has retained his wealth and has also published a book. He is now running to become a United States Senate. That includes the villains were credibly menacing. Anyone who has been hooked on any kind of pill can relate to this film.

The pill in this story, however, is different from anything anyone's heard of You can't help but wonder if you would be tempted to take it yourself. Co-starring with Cooper and his magic pill is the style of the film. It's very stylish and looks great on Blu-Ray. If you're into visuals, this is a good movie to check out. The same goes for fans of suspense.

I found this very entertaining and a film I would watch again. Yeah, the ending is a little contrived but, overall, it's a fun movie to watch. FAQ 3. Is "Limitless" based on a book? Does a drug like NZT really exist? What are the differences between the theatrical cut and the Extended Cut? Details Edit. Release date March 18, United States. United States Mexico.

Official Facebook. English Russian Italian Mandarin French. The Dark Fields. Relativity Media Virgin Produced Rogue. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Limitless opens with a continuous, seemingly endless zoom shot that starts as if the camera had been dropped off a skyscraper balcony, then weaves through the streets of New York, past pedestrians, under construction scaffoldings, though blocks and blocks of blinking lights and hubbub, through the back windows of taxicabs and out through their front windshields, through Harlem, into Times Square, and then right into a glowing Jumbotron.

You are gliding at street level right through solid objects, and the shot reveals little visual evidence of computer-generated trickery. But the shot doesn't end there. It keeps going, sharply and steadily through the inner workings of a human brain, which then morphs into a bird's-eye view of Manhattan, drops onto the roof of a high-rise, and somehow leaves you looking up at the sky.

This is not the kind of sequence that someone can shoot with a regular camera. In fact, this is not the kind of sequence that even the Hubble telescope could shoot--unless it was somehow made of a subatomic particle, had flawless continuous autofocus, packed a bajillion-megapixel sensor, and also had teleportation powers.

After seeing the film, I was determined to find out. I spoke to Comen VFX visual effects producer Josh Comen and visual effects supervisor Tim Carras , both of whom worked on the title sequence and other effects as part of the Limitless crew. Comen and Carras led the team that stitched together, rotoscoped, and composited the sequence, and they provided some fascinating insight on how it came together, from the script to the direction to the camera setup to the extensive post-production process.

Tim Carras: The whole idea for the sequence came from Neil [Burger], the director of the film. His term for it was "fractal zoom. So you can keep continuing infinitely into the details, and they keep growing into the bigger shape that you saw before. The concept was something he'd been thinking about for years, and with this film he finally had a chance to put it into practice.

He's the one who came up with the concept and the look of the shot. PCW: Was that something that was in the script, or was it sort of added after the fact? Carras: It was something Neil added to the shooting script. It basically says, "Camera drops down into New York street, and through a series of fractal zooms, we see X, Y, and Z. Seeing a descriptive line like that in a script is absolutely the fun part of our job. Starting out on the conversation of how it's going to be realized visually is a tremendous thrill, because that's the creative essence of the work we do: taking words on a page and making them into something an audience can watch.

Hopefully, they've never seen something like that before. PCW: Do you want to just dive right in and tell the story of how the sequence was created? Josh Comen: I think if you only use one technique to accomplish a sequence like this, the audience is going to get it, because the audience is always more tuned in than one assumes they are. Carras: Here's the big secret.

Everything you see in that infinite zoom in that scene through New York was shot on completely stationary cameras. The way it was shot is that there was a rig of three Red cameras mounted side by side on a single tripod, and each one had a different lens on it